Capitalism, again.
One of the many ways capitalism has reared its ugly head in music is the notion that if you get to do music, it isn’t work. I’m here to tell you, that has always been bullshit, in my case. Love is work.
Loading in is work. Online promo stuff is work. Practice is work. Learning is work. Saving for gear you need is work. There is no correlation between how much you love it, and how much work it is. Even love is work, ever thought about that? If you do love right, your ass is working at it.
They’re snobs, or even macho.
People buy this notion so much that I get dismissed as a music worker because it must be fun all the time. Maybe that’s why music isn’t more popular. If folks realized how much work it is and how it compared to work they get paid a decent wage for, they wouldn’t be snobs about the whole work thing.
I work on average 10 or so hours a day. Not as many as some, but as many as a lot. Do I love music? Of course. Is it work? Only the hardest work I’ve ever done sometimes. And I’ve done some sh*t.
It’s stigma, again.
See, there’s been this stigma about laziness and income my whole life. People will tell you there’s no money in music. What they’re saying is there’s no work in it, that’s not true. There might not be any for them, but I’m overloaded with music work. I still have to complete it to get paid.
Give loving the work a shot.
When you love someone or something, the work part can be joyful. It can even be enlightening. This isn’t the result of music, but the result of working towards something you love and seeing results. Improvement is part of love. Hard to improve without putting a little elbow grease into it.
Tell them to shut up.
Don’t let folks get away with stupid advice anymore. They don’t know what love is. Are they worth getting worked up over? I’d say it depends if you can get a song out of it, next time you’re working.
I can hear the work put into it and I love it.
I hope you get enjoyment from your effort. The reward in hearing the final directly correlates to the kind of work we did making it. That’s my memory, the work. I do love it, but it’s work.
Here’s a song, (it was a lot of work).
This is a song Keri and I wrote and it was a lot of work. We did creative writing exercises and took a lot of time trying to get into the skin of the character here. It’s about grief. It was real work trying that on for several days. I don’t care what anyone says. I was there. Enjoy.
Like a River, (Kintners version) (on bandcamp)
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